My Journey to the Catholic Faith


Michael Senseney


Where does the journey begin for a Seventh-day Adventist that leads them to the Roman Catholic Church? More amazing than that is how does a Seventh-day Adventist come to the conclusion that the Roman Catholic Church, not the Seventh-day Adventist Church, is God's true Church with God's true message and plan of reconciliation with Him and humankind? Upon reflection I see that my journey began where everyone's life journey begins, in my mother's womb at the moment of conception when the person whom I've become, first came into existence. The answer as to how this journey led to the Catholic Church, over 49 years, could fill volumes, so here are the basics.

I was baptized and raised a Lutheran, went to church with my parents and attended Sunday school. I loved learning the stories of the Bible characters like Moses, Noah, Joseph and his brothers, and Jesus. I developed a deep love for Jesus and the Bible during those years. I remember watching movies from time to time in Sunday school, the old animated films about a boy and his dog titled “Davy and Goliath”. One movie that stuck in my mind was a film about Martin Luther, and how he stood up to the pope and the church during his time, nailed the 95 theses on the door, and launched the Reformation. I understood at an early age that Catholicism was wrong, and that God's heroes were the Protestant Reformers. Around the age of 14-15, like many other kids that age, I stopped going to church. During my high school years I embraced the secular culture of the 1970s. All I can say about that is that I hurt many people and caused many people pain, myself included.

I began college in 1977, and during a philosophy course I began to wonder about life and its meaning, my place in this world and what that meant for me. At this point in time I considered Christianity among other world religions, rejecting atheism and agnosticism as viable “faiths” for me. I remember offering a feeble, yet intensely heartfelt, prayer asking God to lead me to “Truth”. In 1978, while talking with a coworker regarding vivid dreams I was having, a new employee entered the break room. He had overheard our discussion and said, “Oh, that's in the book of Revelation”. I asked him if he was a Christian, and he said yes. He asked me if I was, and I said I was trying. We became friends and talked more often. He was a Seventh-day Adventist, and soon he was presenting Bible studies to me. At a summer Adventist Conference Camp Meeting, I responded to an alter call, gave my life to Jesus, and was baptized into the Seventh-day Adventist Church. I became active in my church in Bible studies and evangelistic outreach. I loved “the truth” that I embraced with all of my being. A year later, in the fall of 1979, I enrolled at Columbia Union College (CUC) in Takoma Park, Maryland, and began studies in Theology in answer to what I believed was God's call to me to become a pastor. I graduated, and received a call from a conference to begin to pastor and attend seminary. I turned down that call. From the time I was baptized in 1978 until I finally stopped attending the Adventist church in 1994, I gave Bible studies, sold Adventist publications as a student literature evangelist, served as president of the Student Ministerial Association for a year at CUC, preached at various local churches, served as an Elder in my local church, participated in prison ministries, and many other activities of the church. Throughout this time I made many close friends as we worshiped and prayed and lived our lives. And yet something important was missing. No matter how hard or how much I prayed, or how often I fasted, or whatever I did, it seemed impossible to receive the grace to resist temptation and sin. Over the course of this struggle, I hurt many people, myself included.

Having come to the realization that the Seventh-day Adventist Church did not have what I once thought it did, I stopped attending church. From 1994 to 2008, thinking that Christianity might not have the answers to life, I settled into what I can only describe as a sort of theistic agnosticism. This was an acknowledgement that God existed, but what did it really matter. In this state of mind I began to move farther and farther from God, and a tolerable despair settled into my mind. While there were joyful times, joy was gone. While there were happy times, happiness was gone. While there were restful times, peace was gone. Then in April of 2008, God intervened in my life in the culmination of all that has occurred in my life from the time of my conception. There is not enough time or space to relate the details of how God leads a person through the thickets of one's life into the clearing of salvation, but upon reflection I see 5 “major moments”, which brought me to the truth of Christianity as received, preserved and taught from the time of the apostles to our present time by the Catholic Church.

First, I was ardently pro-choice when it came to the abortion issue. Even after converting to Adventism, I maintained pro-abortion sentiments until the late 1980s. Oddly enough, these views were not inconsistent with the Seventh-day Adventist's position on abortion. In the late 1980s I read the book “Aborting America” by Dr. Bernard Nathanson, one of the early advocates of the pro-choice movement. After all the work he did in the 1970s to get abortion legalized, he had a change in his views. In this book, he outlined from a purely biological standpoint, that most abortions destroy what is defined in the Harvard School of Medicine's Medical Dictionary, as human life. After reading this book I changed my views as well. Knowing that abortions were, (and probably still are) performed in Seventh-day Adventist hospitals, and while I was an Elder in my local Seventh-day Adventist church, I wrote to the Columbia Union president at the time to ask him to consider changing the policies in Adventist hospitals in our Union. At first he told me those stories were only rumors. With the help of a pro-life OB/GYN, I obtained the statistics for abortions performed at 2 Maryland Adventist hospitals. There were close to 2,000 abortions performed in these two hospitals in just a two year period. The public hospital where the pro-life OB/GYN practiced performed less than 25 in the same time period. I wrote to the General Conference president as well, and they were not as interested in stopping abortion practices as they were in getting legislation passed to ban tobacco. I left the Adventist Church in 1994 and never went back. While still believing that Catholicism was totally wrong, I did admire that they always stood up for protecting the life of the innocent unborn, when many other Christian churches did not.

The second “major moment” came when I read the first volume of the 2 volume Neo-Conned set. That book was” Neo-Conned!: Just War Principles: A Condemnation of War in Iraq” by Bishop Hilarion Capucci, D. Liam O'Huallachain, J. Forrest Sharpe, and George Lopez. Once again, the Catholic Church was standing on the side of life and sanity, and condemned a war which the majority of Christian churches (as well as many American Catholics) supported fervently. While still believing that Catholicism was totally wrong, I once again admired the Church for standing up against evil that so many accepted as right. Yet, while I was impressed with the courage of the Catholic Church on these issues, I was still at a loss for the answers that could heal my own spiritual disintegration.

The third “major moment” occurred in the first couple years of the new millennium when I attended a Catholic mass with my wife, which was a rare event for me. The priest's homily was about the Eucharist. When we left the church that day I told my wife that if I was ever to believe the Eucharist, it would be because of that priest's homily. Of course I would NEVER believe the Eucharist. In my mind at the time, just the thought of that “ritual” created more anger and hatred and resentment toward Catholicism than anything I ever believed about Catholicism in my days as an Adventist. A couple years passed, and many “read-books” later, I was with my wife in a Catholic bookstore shopping for a gift for a relative. In the course of conversation with the lady working at the store, we discovered that we had read some of the same books. Out of nowhere, I asked her is she could recommend a book about the Eucharist for a protestant. She did, and I purchased “The Hidden Manna: A Theology of the Eucharist” by Father James T. O'Connor. I read it, and oddly enough I believed it. For the first time in my studies I was presented with the writings of the early Church leaders, and was surprised to discover that the early Christians believed in Jesus' real presence in the elements of the Lord's Supper. While not fully embracing, at that point in time, some of the other teachings regarding the Eucharist, I could not dispute what the first Christians believed and practiced. And now I was between a rock and a hard place (no pun intended). I believed the Eucharist, which the Adventist church and perhaps all other protestant churches do not believe; and I still believed in the obligation of the 7th day Sabbath (even though I was not attending any church), which the Catholic Church, and perhaps all other protestant churches do not believe. And then my despair grew deeper and deeper because I was not going back to the Adventist church, and could not bring myself to go to the Catholic Church. I was alone and sinking deeper and deeper into spiritual despair. A few more years passed in this empty wasteland in which I found myself, and it became more and more evident to my family.

The fourth “major moment” came in the winter of 2008 when I began to pray once again to God. It had been a long time since I prayed earnestly and honestly to God. I called the priest whose homily on the Eucharist had inspired me to study the subject. We met and talked. He advised me to continue my journey with much prayer and if I needed anything to call him. I left, I prayed, and as the months went on I stopped praying. The despair returned and I began to reach rock bottom. Then I began to pray again in April of 2008. My prayers each night for a week were to God asking him to just let me die rather than suffer in the spiritual no-where-land that I found myself. And then my final prayer that week was spent crying violently most of the night begging God to kill me or show me His truth, and above all else to not let me be deceived by the Beast and the anti-Christ. The next day a peace came over me, and I picked up a book that my children had given to me as a present the year before, which had just been sitting on my shelf. That book was “A Father Who Keeps His Promises” by Dr. Scott Hahn. Having no idea who Dr. Hahn was at that point in time I began reading his book. And as I read that book, the issue of the 7th day Sabbath was resolved for me. That was the last issue holding me back from joining the Catholic Church. I would read what Dr. Hahn was writing, and go back to my Bible and check it, and I was surprised by many things. But perhaps the most surprising thing was to discover that two major beliefs I had as an Adventist were contrary to what the Bible said. That is surprising since for all my years as an Adventist, it was our claim that we believed what we believed from the Bible and the Bible alone. And yet two verses revealed that I must have been blind. My belief regarding the weekly Sabbath being established at Creation, and required to be observed by man was inaccurate. I believed, as most Adventists believe that Genesis reveals a literal 7 day creation period based on the designations of evening and morning being mentioned in the Bible at the end of each creation day. And yet in Genesis 2:2,3, the seventh day when God rested from all his work, there is no mention of evening and morning. I always believed there was, and having talked with some of my Adventist friends, they were sure that was mentioned in the Bible as well. It is not. The other verse was John 19:28 Later, knowing that all was now completed, and so that the Scripture would be fulfilled, Jesus said, "I am thirsty." 29 A jar of wine vinegar was there, so they soaked a sponge in it, put the sponge on a stalk of the hyssop plant, and lifted it to Jesus' lips. 30 When he had received the drink, Jesus said, "It is finished." With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit. Adventists are opposed to the use of alcohol and it was always a major point in opposing alcohol to teach that Jesus never drank alcohol, not even on the cross when it was offered to him. And yet the verse above tells us that Jesus “received” the wine vinegar on the cross. It is still amazing to me that I overlooked, for years, what these two very important verses so obviously say.

The fifth “major moment” came after reading “A Father Who Keeps His Promises”. I called the priest I originally met with and we met and talked again about joining the Catholic Church. I prayed and decided to go through the R.C.I.A. program in the fall of 2008, and join the Church at Easter in 2009. I have since read “The Catechism of The Catholic Church”, and was humbled by the fact that even after all those years as an Adventist, claiming to know what the Catholic Church teaches in error…I had absolutely no idea what the Catholic Church teaches. I would guess that the majority of Adventists and Protestants, in general, have no idea either. And at the very least, Adventists, whose doctrines about the end times center predominately around the Catholic Church, should make reading the Catechism of the Catholic Church mandatory.

These are the highlights of my journey. My feeble prayer offered in 1977 asking God to lead me to “Truth” is finally answered. It would take volumes to relate this journey clearly, so for anyone who would like to discuss anything about my journey to Catholicism, please feel free to contact me through this website. I will be more than happy to talk with you! I am for the first time in my Christian life experiencing the grace of Jesus Christ in ways I only used to dream of. The Catholic Church provides the place on this earth to worship God in fullness and in spirit and in truth. Jesus, The Word of God, is Truth. May we all be in Jesus, and He in us. God bless you all!